10 Things Apple Should do With its Piles of Cash

Share This article

6. Buy a fleet of aircraft carriers and create an independent sovereign stateIn a similar vein, Apple could buy a fleet of aircraft carriers, which are surprisingly cheap — about $10 billion new, or about $10 million on the second-hand market (but that’s without engines — sail out into international waters and declare its sovereignty. If you thought Steve Jobs deserved a better title than “CEO”, how about… king?

Of course, what good king has a fleet of aircraft carriers without aircraft? A Boeing 737 for shipping employees around can be had for a few million dollars, and the F-14 Tomcat from Top Gun costs just $38 million — and really, how can Jobs put a price on being able to say “… and he’ll fly right by”! from his very own attack fighter?Oh, you could throw in a nuclear submarine, too — you know, for MAD, just in case Bill Gates gets one.

By now, you are probably starting to realize just how much money 300 billion dollars is.

7. Pay off all Third World Africa debtsThe size of “Third World debt” — the unpayable debt built up by developing African countries over the last 50 years — is grossly misunderstood. We are often led to believe that the money owed by the governments of developing nations is hundreds of billions, or trillions, of dollars — but in fact, the entire African continent — 1 billion people belonging to 54 sovereign countries — owes just $220 billion. In 2015, Apple could pay it off and still have money left over for eradicating AIDS worldwide.

8. Colonize space, or buy the Moon.While it’s hard to put an exact cost on colonizing space, Apple definitely has the money to either help NASA and the European Space Agency out, or to commercialize space travel. Imagine it now: iSpace, iNtergalactic, and my favorite: iMoon. A single acre of Moon land costs around $20, and the moon’s total surface area is only 9.4 billion acres — so, yes, for $188 billion, Apple could buy the Moon.

But what does one do with a celestial body? You can’t exactly steer it, and terraforming it would take years and require technology that not even Apple has. You could mine it — a next-generation iPad made from moon rocks would be cool — but really, the only sensible option is carving the Moon into a huge apple. Imagine: a 2,000-mile-wide, bright, white, shiny Apple, hanging in the sky for all to see. It brings a tear to your ear.

9. Buy all the music labels and give away free musicFor just a few billion dollars, Apple could settle the concept of music piracy and shut down the RIAA for ever by simply buying every major record label. With their cash Apple could buy out the Big Four — Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal — and offer free or almost-free music to everyone.With messy publishing deals out of the way — Apple would centralize the music industry around iTunes, of course — there would be a lot more money for the artists, too.

10. Buy the world’s fastest super computer and create iWorldWhen we wrote about Cray’s plan to build a 300-cabinet, 7,200-server, 57,600-processor supercomputer that’s capable of 35 petaflops, a reader pointed out that you could use such a computer to create the most realistic virtual world ever created. Apple could create iWorld, a perfect parallel universe of the world we live in — think of The Matrix, but with iPhones and iPads instead of “guns, lots of guns.”Surprisingly, supercomputers are quite cheap to operate: the world’s most powerful computer, Tianhe-1A, cost only $88 million to make, and $20 million per year to operate. There’s no doubt that a fully decked-out Cray XK6 would cost a lot of money, and the development of a game that’s capable of knocking World of the Warcraft from its throne would be tricky, but $300 billion really ought to cover it.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.